


Plus the Ones I Don't Remember

by bethagain



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Basically my head is full of stories about Furiosa's history but it's a bit dark in here, Birth Defects, Child Abuse, Gen, Miscarriage, Not all the way dark but there are definitely moments, Original Character Death(s), Other Not Nice Things, Violence, trigger warnings for trauma, trying to figure out what happened to her that led up to taking that left turn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-11 11:11:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 13,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4433276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethagain/pseuds/bethagain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>7,000 days... plus the ones I don't remember.</i>
</p>
<p>This is what happened after Furiosa was taken from the Green Place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the beginning of something that ends when Furiosa takes that left turn and sets the events of MM:FR into motion.
> 
> Those scenes early in the film, when she deliberately sacrifices her War Rig crew, kind of break my heart, and I wanted to know _what happened to her_ that that's a choice she could make. This story grew from trying to figure that out. 
> 
> It's not done yet, but I know where it's going. Thanks in advance to anyone who decides to come along for the ride. It's going to be a bumpy one, and there are no safety wires here. 
> 
> Trigger warnings are in the AO3 warnings and the tags and I'll do my best to update if needed. 
> 
> p.s. If you've read the Furiosa comic, you'll recognize where the opening scene came from. And if you hated the Furiosa comic, don't worry: I hated it too.

“This is a tale of betrayal,” says the History Woman. As she speaks, the words on her face stretch and bend and change. 

She can see the faces of the children closest to her in the lamplight. Beyond the first circle, they blur into cool darkness. Pale shapes fill the Vault all the way to its round door. Wind creeps through the shattered glass panes that once kept this room pure.

Pure. The History Woman knows that once, this would not have been a story for children. How does she know? Stories passed down. Stories of peace, stories of plenty, stories of water. Of movies and ice cream and universities and _green._

Simple stories for children once-long-ago. Good against evil, hate conquered by love. Happily ever after. In those stories, pure and corrupt never lived in the same room. Clean and polluted never occupied the same soul. Vile and good never shared the same heart. 

“Betrayal,” she says again. “Betrayal of a bad man, of a good man, of a life lived. Of friends. Betrayal, because a lost child saw no other way. It’s your history, children, and the story isn’t straight. It isn’t restful. It isn’t easy. 

“That lost child bought your shelter, bought your food, bought your freedom. You are her redemption. Learn her story well.”

 

Was the child, says the History Woman, ever a child? She came to this place perfect and whole, but with her heart hidden and her name buried. In the first days, says the History Woman, she said nothing, refused everything. She fought harsh as blown sand and hard as desert stone. A child, says the History Woman, might have cried. 

How does the History Woman know? She doesn’t. She is spinning the story out of memories older than her own, but she thinks of how the child might have been. She thinks of a pretty girl with hair bound back by leather and feathers. The girl has strong arms, tanned face, knowledge of clean water and nourishing mud and growing things. She is wrapped in an embroidered blanket and her boots, below the fringed edge, are covered in drying dirt. The girl is sleeping beside her mother. They each have a hand on a gun.

A few yards away their grey-haired companion keeps watch. It was a long ride to the edge of the green lands, to the edge of the fields, where they walked the irrigation lines with rifles across their backs and wrenches in their rough, strong hands. It was a long morning’s ride and a long day’s work. Their companion has kept watch on many nights over many years, but tonight her head sinks down and her rifle slips from her knees. 

Tonight, she fails. 

And so, says the History Woman, the first betrayal. Not by intention or by malice, but by age and exhaustion. By being human on the edge of the Wasteland, where betrayal is a way of life.

 

The child’s next days are marked by fire. 

There is fire in her wrists where they are bound with metal rings, cinched tight so her small hands cannot slip free. There is fire in her jaw where, screaming defiance, she was pistol-whipped by a woman twice her size and three times her strength. Her vision blurs with the fire of her anger, which has not yet become fear. She lies on the back of a flatbed, feet bound to hands bound to a steel ring welded to the rear of the cab.

Beside her, her mother is also bound at wrists and ankles, bound to the flatbed, bound facing her child, at least, so the child can see her as well as the golden desert racing by. Beside her, her mother has said, “Hush.” Her mother has said, “Be still, be calm, be strong.” Her mother has said, “If we fight now, we will lose. So we will see.”

The child’s name is Furiosa. Her name comes not from rage but from music: played with vigor and passion. Violin strings dry out in the desert and the horsehair splits and sheds from the bow. But a violin kept near green growing things will hold a tune well enough for a group of wild women, who only want a song to dance to under clear night skies. 

Furiosa has grown up with music. 

She has also grown up knowing how to shoot a gun.

Now, the sound of tires rolling over sand and stone fills her ears. Her fingers clench and unclench, wishing for a handgun, for the handle of a knife. But she has been trained well. She will heed her mother, who smiles at her gently and sings soft songs as the day goes on and the desert sun burns.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO many apologies if you read the earlier incarnation of Ch. 2 and are now wondering what's happened to it. I figured out how to do some stuff better (I hope!) and went back and fixed it up a bit. Please forgive, I hate changing stuff after I post it because I think it's such a burden on the reader, and I'm so delighted you are here at all!

Days later, she wakes from exhausted sleep to find she is seated in a row of children, all chained to a fence at their backs. The boy beside her sags, head down, shoulders slack as his arms stretch out behind him. She guesses he is eight or nine years old, just a few years younger than she. 

There is a tarp stretched above their heads. It protects them from the sun but not the heat. It is the seventh day since her capture, and the first six were without shade. She can feel sunburn deep in her skin when she moves her mouth or the muscles around her eyes. Her hands, more accustomed to being exposed to the sun, are not so bad, but her face is raw and even her ears hurt when her hair brushes against them.

Her wrists feel bruised where the shackles press into her skin. A short chain joins the handcuffs encircling her ankles. They're not terribly tight, but they're uncomfortable. If she stretches her legs out in front of her, sharp edges press against her Achilles tendons or her ankle bones.

But she doesn’t struggle, doesn’t wear her wrists or her ankles raw from chafing. "Be still," her mother had said, "Be strong," and Furiosa still heeds her mother's words even though on the third day she had watched her mother die.

All around the row of captives, people go about their business. There are carts being pulled by children who are barefoot, bent over, rags hanging from their hips and shoulders. She sees men and women walking among them, wearing patched but sturdy cotton and polished leather, wooden staffs in their hands and guns at their waists. She hears the sounds of machinery behind her and when she turns her head, she sees whitish rocks riding up on a conveyor belt into a high, square building, and white powder dropping out into carts on the other side.

The carts are all going to the same place, a tall mound of that same white powder. It's just inside a gate. Furiosa looks up and sees that there is a high wall around them, with razor wire at the top. Tire tracks make long, curving lines in a flat plain of yellow dust. There is nothing else beyond the fence but the horizon.

 

She misses her mother.

She doesn't have to close her eyes to see it, the dusty surface of the flatbed, her mother's face under sunburn and dirt. How they unlocked her mother from the truck and walked her, multiple guns at her head and back, to a squared-off van that still bore traces of painted flowers on the side.

How her mother held her head up and her spine straight. How she whispered again, as they came for her: Not now. The time will come.

How a half dozen cars, silver and black, speedy on big tires and light with only a few guns, had come up from a gully, cutting off their captors’ convoy, swinging fearlessly among the vehicles to push them out of line.

How the squared-off van swerved and toppled and rolled, coming to rest on its crumpled roof. How a grenade sailed from the window of a black and silver chrome-covered car. How no one crawled from the wreckage before its twisted shape became the shape of flames.

 

She talks to the others, in the beginning. She joins in sharing food, gives away water to the weaker ones.

At night, chained again to the fence, they huddle as close to each other as their bonds allow. Their rough blankets are threadbare and full of holes, providing just enough warmth for sleep but not enough for comfort in the cold desert nights.

She makes friends, almost, with the boy who was beside her that first day. He is eleven, he says when she asks him. Was born in a place where life was harsh and food was scarce and growing happened slow if it happened at all. He listens wide-eyed at the other children's stories. Of a town where pigs and goats live behind fences and there is always milk to drink and meat to eat. Of traps for crows and ravens and the taste of bird flesh, hot and crackling off an open fire. Furiosa keeps the oath she made to her mother, to her sisters, even though she aches to talk of a place where green fields stretch so far, it’s a long ride to reach the edge. A long day to walk the irrigation pipes, checking for leaks and fixing them, eating strawberries along the way. 

 

The boy dies on day 17. Or at least, she thinks he does.

The children are shoveling salt. The sun is yellow in a clear blue sky and the boy has gone from dripping sweat to dry, hot skin. He has finished his own water and Furiosa's. When he has fallen twice she calls to their guards and when there is no answer she raises her voice and when there is still no answer she makes an accusation.

She gets a wooden stick to the back of her head for her trouble. 

When she wakes, chained to the fence, head pounding, hair matted and sticky, the boy is gone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Made some edits to Ch. 2 just before posting this one. I apologize to anyone who read the earlier version and is wondering why some things in Ch. 3 seem redundant. Please bear with me... this story is kicking my butt.
> 
> So many thanks to [frostbitepanda](http://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostbitePanda/pseuds/FrostbitePanda) for the beta read. It's definitely better than it was before! Any remaining issues are absolutely all on me.

For a time there is a girl with copper colored hair and the fairest skin. Furiosa lets the girl stand in the shade of her own body while they load white blocks onto the conveyor belt. 

Above them is the bleached-white, wood-paneled building, the only tall thing in the flat landscape. It sits 20 feet up atop a metal scaffold marred with rust. Scattered square cut-outs serve as windows. Inside, a machine clanks and growls. From certain angles Furiosa can glimpse metal jaws chewing salt blocks into pieces, huge rollers turning. 

At the end of each day, there are bowls of thin soup. Sometimes it’s still warm. Each night, Furiosa and the copper-haired girl pour soup between their bowls until the levels are equal. Sometimes Furiosa gets a chunk of meat when the girl’s bowl has none, and she carefully bites it in half to share. Many nights they’re next to each other along the fence. They put their blankets one atop the other and share the space beneath them.

 

The first time they see the mine, guns aimed at their faces and their backs, Furiosa holds on to the still-pale hand as the other girl shakes with fear in the downsloping tunnel. The mine is a geometry of giant steps and right-angled rooms. The straight lines are broken by the small shapes of children. Some work in pairs to twist large drill bits down into the salt. Some pound its surface with pickaxes until large chunks break away. 

The air is dust.

Light from oil lamps makes dim orange circles ending in deep shadows.

They work in the mine for hours, days. They sleep when they can’t work anymore, curling up on hard salt or the rock that surrounds it, out of the way of crashing blocks and swinging tools. Sometimes Furiosa wakes beside her friend in darkness, the guards having moved their group along, and they feel their way along rough walls toward the faint orange glow. 

Furiosa considers walking the other way, instead. But without the lamps the darkness is so complete it hurts her eyes, and she is sure she doesn’t remember the way back to the sunlight.

With no sunrises or sunsets, she begins to lose count of the days.

 

They have been given rags to wear across their faces. Furiosa wears hers. It’s hot and it makes it feel like the air doesn’t quite get to her, but without it, her mouth goes dry and her throat burns. Her friend wears hers for a few minutes or an hour and then claws it away from her mouth to take huge gasps. Furiosa watches and worries. She doesn’t know how dangerous the dust might be, but breathing it can’t be good. Over and over, she tugs the rag up over the pale face, below frightened brown eyes. Over and over, the girl pulls it down again.

The copper-haired girl starts dropping tools. She sleeps longer. Furiosa sees her touching her stomach sometimes, bent over and breathing shallow. She see the girl’s hands shake as she sets down her drill. 

One day when a salt block falls, the copper-haired girl falls with it, arms and legs thrashing. It lasts for minutes. With no sunrise and sunset, Furiosa thinks, this could actually be seconds, or hours, or days. Some time later--hours, or days, or weeks--the guards drive them back to the surface, where the girl’s body is taken from the two children who carried her. Furiosa holds her hand again, on the way up through the dark, narrow tunnels, so she knows it has gone stiff and cold.

 

The days go on. The roof of a mine tunnel collapses, fast as a blink and thunderous, and when the dust has settled a bit Furiosa finds that her trousers are torn and her left thigh is scraped and bleeding, and in front of her is a pile of sharp-edged rubble. There were six children in there, she thinks, maybe seven. Two little ones, captives for only a few months. The rest were older, survived this long, had shared food with her, blankets, whispers. If any guards were lost, she doesn’t know: in her mind they have become blurred shapes with cruel sticks. There are still two to train their guns on her, to walk her and the others down tunnels to find another place to dig. 

 

It is day 997, of the ones she remembers, of the best count she has been able to keep. Furiosa’s body, which has always been strong, has become wiry and thin, muscles and skin and little else. In spite of this, her hips have begun to widen and she is aware that the firmness beneath her nipples is the first sign of developing breasts. She has watched the other girls to see what they do when their monthly blood comes. She has seen them pass around stained rags washed in water carefully hoarded and pooled from their rations. Furiosa has rags wrapped around her ankles to keep the handcuffs from rubbing away her skin. She considers whether she will use them, when the time comes.

It is 213 days since she has spoken. It no longer occurs to her to ask to share.

 

Furiosa is not the only one who has noticed her changing body. 

They come for her as she emerges from the mine tunnel, skin coated in white rime, eyes stinging, the taste of salt on her lips and in her mouth and down her throat. It is 1,094 days, counting by meals and sleeps and changing guards, since she was taken from her home. 157 days since she was last able to wash the salt from her skin. 

They rinse her down, a man gripping each of her arms. Struggling would waste her tiny reserve of energy, and so she is still as the water weighs down her hair, soaks her thin tunic, sluices over and between her legs and soaks the rags at her ankles. The chain between the shackles is much too short for her to run.

They bind her to a fence again. This time she is placed near the great mound of salt at the compound entrance, where travelers pass by with trade and pass by again with sacks light or heavy, according to their skill at making a bargain. 

The men dry themselves off, laughing as they walk away. Furiosa is left to shiver as the water on her skin cools and the desert night sets in.

 

In the morning, she sees how it will be. There is a girl chained next to her, dressed in canvas trousers and leather shirt, hair wild. Furiosa has never seen her before. The girl screams at her captors, at the traders going by. Furiosa doesn’t understand her slang, but it’s clearly a stream of insults. It buys the girl a slap across the face and a gag in her mouth. 

Furiosa keeps her silence. Her own mouth is left free for offers of sweets from men who would own her. She spits at them when they come near until her mouth is dry, and then she licks blood from her cracked lips and tries to spit that, too. When a man offers her water, laughing as he dribbles it down her chin, she bites him.

 

She loses days again. She would wonder why they don’t clean up the girls and boys offered for sale, trim their hair and make them pretty, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The ones who don’t object are led away first. A tall, dark-skinned girl is taken by a stocky man who wears a faded waistcoat over his bare chest and two hats on his head. He seems gentle and looks kind, until he leers at her. Until he hits her when she shrinks away. 

The boy taken next is stick-thin and small, but graceful in a way that sparks a sharp, painful memory of dancing. The man who takes him has knives holstered on thighs, calves, forearms, shoulders, chest. His face is scarred on each side in a line from forehead to lips. He walks with five other men similarly scarred, two of them flanking the boy, their large hands around his forearms. 

Her captors are stingy with water, more so with food. It’s enough to keep her alive, but so little that it keeps her weak and thirsty. Twice a day they bring buckets for bodily functions. Her piss is dark yellow, what there is of it. Her shackles are looser, resting over bones jutting out at her wrists, but not loose enough to let her slip away. And even if she could, where would she go? There is only desert beyond the fence. The traders arrive in dusty cars and with dusty skin. 

She begins to think that trading herself may be worth the risk.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, this is me learning to deal with imperfection. This is me realizing that if I don't post as I go along, if I insist on getting everything _just right_ before I share it... the next Mad Max movie will have come and gone from theaters and I will still be here tinkering with phrases and word choices and--yeah, it's gotta stop somewhere. 
> 
> So to anyone out there who's bearing with me and reading along: I hope you are enjoying this journey at least a little, and as always thank you for joining me on it! 
> 
> p.s. I don't think we need any new trigger warnings for this chapter, but there will be some coming up. I'll continue to update tags as needed.

The one with the tattooed face is not the first woman to consider Furiosa, but she is the first to get up close and carefully look her over. Furiosa is so startled by the words on the older woman’s skin that she forgets to spit. She sits there reading hungrily as the woman checks her teeth, tests her joints, counts her fingers. She has learned better than to think that she will be safer with a woman than with a man, but when she sees that heavy jerrycans are changing hands, she waits quietly. Maybe they’ll take off her shackles. Maybe where they are going, there is food and water and shade. Maybe she will finally, finally be able to run.

 

The car is enormous, jacked up on deep-treaded tires. Furiosa is bound in the middle of the wide back seat, a chain around her neck to hold her in place. Even so the padding on the seat is a comfort, soft against her jutting shoulder blades and hip bones. She can look left and right, metal rubbing against her skin.

She knows she has sold herself in exchange for a small and tenuous hope. She wonders, to whom.

Beyond the open window, the sun burns hot and bright. Plumes of yellow dust rise behind cars and trucks keeping pace. She counts five, all different, from an open buggy jagged with guns to a six-wheeled truck heavy with armor.

The drivers are young men. They climb in and out of the windows of the moving cars, change vehicles at full speed, hang outside and call to the others in the convoy. She hears their footsteps crossing the roof over her head. They switch places at the wheel, one sliding away while the other slides in, and Furiosa is reminded again of dancing.

The men’s faces are painted in white clay. Some of them have black around their eyes, like the holes in skulls. They wear pants with many pockets, tool belts, heavy boots. Some have shirts with the sleeves torn off to bare muscled shoulders. Some wear heavy canvas jackets over bare chests. Their jaws and heads are shaved. 

They don’t seem to think she needs a guard while the convoy is in motion and-to her frustration-they are right. She watches, she listens, she reaches as far as she can into the space between the seat and the upright back. But her hands come up empty.

Sometimes when a new driver arrives through the window, he brings a canteen of water. Sometimes food drops in through a rectangular opening above her head. The men seem to toss it casually, but it always lands squarely in her lap. The strange rubbery cakes taste of little but fill her belly for the first time in… She stops herself from finishing that thought. A full belly and enough to drink, that was a different time, a different place, and she won’t mourn for it because it is still there. She can feel it waiting for her to find her way home.

Her body doesn't know what to do with the food, at first. Her bowels growl and fill with air. It's a strange feeling to have a full bladder. As the hours go on, the sensations cross over from from discomfort to pain.

She thinks that she needs the car to stop. She thinks that she needs a bucket. But it has been so long since she used her voice.

And so she is surprised when the convoy slows, when three men drop down into the car, two holding guns on her while the third unlocks the chain around her neck. He opens a door and motions her out as the car rolls to a stop, guns still trained on her as she stumbles onto the sand.

Some of the words he uses are new to her, but she gets the meaning. It's been so long since anyone cared about her dignity, she has only a memory of shame. She lowers her trousers as best she can with wrists locked close together. She does her business, rubs her body against the dirt to clean off the worst of the mess, lets the men order her back into the car again.

Furiosa sees how the men hang off the sides of the moving cars to empty their bladders, leaving long lines of wet in the sand. Yet the convoy begins stopping every few hours to repeat the same ritual, three men each time watching her relieve herself on the sand.

 

They drive all night while the desert is flat. The stars turn the sand silver.

At first Furiosa is startled into a gasp each time the car bumps over something, spends several moments with heart racing, trying to get enough air back into her lungs. By the third day she has sunk into the rhythm of wheels on sand, of light coming up over the horizon each morning and of the sky returning to black each night. Her breathing feels steadier and her heart no longer stutters, as she realizes she can count days with assurance again.

Halfway through the third day, flat desert gives way to dunes. On the fourth day there are rocks level with the surface of the sand. 

Her skin begins to heal. Sunburn blisters dry up and turn to flakes. The salt sores on her fingers and palms, on her feet and forearms, stop weeping and begin to scab.

On the morning of the fifth day, there are rocks rising above the surface and the convoy slows, skirting them carefully one by one. Now they stop at night and the convoy sleeps in shifts, guards posted on hoods and roofs and one at her window. Furiosa falls asleep with cold blue eyes watching her and a gun, its barrel resting on the doorframe, pointed at her head.

They ride along ridges and down into ravines. Once there is dust rising in the distance and the white-painted men are shouting and reaching for weapons. The dust plume shrinks and fades and after a time the convoy calms.

When the sun is high on the seventh day, three tall rock spires break the horizon.

 

The air around the convoy is full of dust, but soon the spires are close enough for Furiosa to see how the smooth cliffs of reddish rock break into crags, high above the desert. She's not sure, but she thinks she can see something green growing in the crevices.

 

And now the convoy rattles onto a road, packed dirt with defined edges, that points like an arrow toward the base of those towers. There is a new energy among the men. The vehicles pull into a neat line, drivers sitting tall, guards perched two to a vehicle on running boards and bumpers.

Now she can make out mechanical cranes lining the cliff-tops, reaching down toward the ground with massive hooks. One of them is swinging the crumpled body of a car toward a shadowed, square opening hundreds of feet up.

As they get closer they pass crooked, narrow structures made of splintered wood, scrap metal, rags. Some look as though they are held together by nothing more than the dirt that covers them. Here and there a rag twitches away to reveal a face peering through a gap, but no one comes out to greet them.

Finally, the vehicles ahead slow and then stop. They form a half-circle in the shelter of the towers' tall stone walls, making a barrier around Furiosa’s car as it bumps up onto a platform with huge chains at each corner. 

The platform begins to rise. 

Still chained in the middle of the seat, Furiosa watches red dirt be replaced by empty blue sky.

The platform finally clanks to a stop and the car rolls forward. It seems dark here after the bright of the desert, but white paint on skin stands out. She sees men, shirtless in black pants and boots, leaning over engines and sliding under chassis. She sees stairs carved into rock, angling upward and descending to some lower level.

The door on her right side opens. 

The woman with the words on her face is there, white-faced men flanking her on either side. Furiosa’s eyes strain to read the tattoos again, but in her mind she hears her mother’s words. There are too many men and she doesn’t know where to run. 

If she fights now, she will lose.

One of the men kneels on the seat beside her and slides the metal links from around her neck. The whites of his eyes stand out from the smudges of black surrounding them. 

Moments later she is standing beside the car, wrists and ankles unbound for the first time in at least 1,108 days. Her feet feel light, as though they are lifting off the floor. Her hands feel… normal. For the first time since she was twelve years old. 

She eyes the stairs. What’s below? Above? If she could be quick enough to dodge away, what might be waiting?

“Don’t bother, girlie,” says one of the men. The left side of his mouth is puckered with white scar. “There’s boys ‘round every corner would love to be the one to catch you.”

“Hush,” says the woman with the words on her face. “You’ll scare her.”

The man’s eyes and shoulders drop. The word “sorry” is a mumble, but it’s there.

 

Furiosa sits on the floor of a bare stone cell. A chain is connected to her right leg. It’s a reminder that someone thinks they own her.

She is still in her dirt-caked tunic and trousers, rags wrapped around her ankles. Her hands are free but they are empty. She longs for a hammer, bolt cutters, a screwdriver, a saw.

They have left her fresh vegetables and a pile of the cakes that take away her hunger for hours at a time. There is enough water to last for days if she is careful, even if they don’t bring her more. 

She has a fresh bruise on her left hip. She walked here surrounded by the white-faced men, her senses full of the lightness of moving with no shackles to weigh her down. But then one of the men grabbed her arms while another reached for the chain, and in that moment she forgot to measure her chances. She didn’t wait and see. With a metal band about to close once again around her ankle, she _twisted._

Muscles made strong from drilling and cutting and carrying moved easily. Her legs remembered running and she was out the door with the exhilaration of getting free.

Three men took her down just beyond the doorway, bringing her to the ground with the weight of muscle and bone, of boots and belts of tools. 

She doesn’t understand why there aren’t more bruises. Why there was no boot to the ribs, no fist to her belly or kidneys or face, no words, as they carried her struggling back to the stone room and fastened the chain to her ankle, beyond “Don’t hurt her.” And, “I won’t.”

 

The cell's door is made of metal, different-sized sheets in different shades of grey, welded together with neat lines. It clangs softly as it opens. A young man with a pale, clay-painted face is there, a bucket filled with water in each hand. He stays out of her reach but shoves the buckets and a cloth bundle toward her across the floor. His shoulders are just a little hunched and his spine a little curved, as though he’s trying not to take up any space in this stone cell.

This man is one of many identical men, to her, but he knows her. Before he goes he says, “I’m sorry about pointin’ that gun at you on the road.” His eyes lift toward her face just a fraction. “It’s just, we knew you didn’t know. He’ll take care of you. Things’ll be shiny and chrome.” He backs away with what almost looks like a bow. “It’s ok to wash, no one’s gonna bother you,” he adds in a hurry, and is out the door.

She leans out to the end of the chain and snags the bucket, draws it toward her. There is a cloth bag tucked around the handle and in it a whole bar of lavender-scented soap. The soap has clean edges and the maker’s name pressed into one side. She is surprised to see this thing, left from the old days, precious and rare. Furiosa remembers lavender. It’s one of the smells of the growing season. 

The metal door is closed and the room is quiet. With one ankle still shackled, not knowing where she is or what is going to happen to her, Furiosa eyes the door for another moment, and then she sinks a hand below the surface of a bucket. 

The water is warm. 

It’s a conscious decision to take the risk. 

She strips her rags off quickly, shirt dropped at her feet and trousers bunched around the shackle. She uses the cloth bag to rub on soap and rinse it until the water in the first bucket is black. As she wrings out the cloth and starts on the second bucket, she finds that she is sobbing. 

The water in the second bucket turns only gray, not black. The tears continue as she ducks her head in, scrubbing as best she can at the tangle of her hair. 

The clothing bundle contains a white terrycloth towel. It's rough and the edges are frayed, but it's the first towel she’s seen in at least 1,108 days. Tears drip from her chin, not worth drying because she can’t get them to stop. The towel picks up some of the remaining dirt from her body and hair, turning brown as she rubs at her head. 

She unfolds the rest of the bundle. There is a long white tunic and a soft white skirt that wraps and ties around her waist. She puts them on and is catapulted back to memories of fresh-washed clothes dried in the sun. Her tears finally slow as she sits cross-legged on the floor of the stone room, dirt-caked trousers shoved away from her over the chain. Her body is not clean but it’s better, her wounds are visibly healing, and her fresher memories are pushed back by thoughts of green fields, sweet rain, and the sight of lavender coming into bloom.


	5. Chapter 5

She is startled from sleep by a knock on the metal door. She finds that she doesn’t know what to do. “Come in” might suggest she thought this was her space, that she had some right to it, and she hasn’t been allowed to own anything but the rags she wore for a very long time. 

“Come in” could also imply that she wanted whatever was on the other side. 

“Go away” would be useless, most likely. 

She could say “Who are you,” but would it matter? She doesn’t know names or roles here. She doesn’t know titles or rank. 

There is another knock and then the door swings open. The woman with the words on her face steps through, alone. 

The woman’s arms are bare and there are more words there, crawling down from her shoulders to her wrists. They’re a mystery at this distance, Furiosa can’t make them out and can’t imagine what they’re for. The woman closes the door behind her. Her hair is black turning grey and her face is lined, not yet old but getting there. She carries a little extra weight and it makes her look soft but it’s reassuring, as though this is a place where there is always enough to eat. She wears a simple dress of the same cloth as Furiosa’s skirt and tunic, dyed gray and belted at the waist. There are words on her right leg. The left is smooth, blank skin.

The woman carries a three-legged stool. She unfolds it and sets it down near the doorway, beyond the length of Furiosa’s chain.

Furiosa’s eyes shift to the supply of drinking water, the stacks of vegetable cakes. The woman’s gaze follows.

“You go ahead and drink all you want,” she says. “Eat that good food. You can have more.”

Furiosa will decide later whether to believe her.

“What’s your name, child?” the woman asks. 

When Furiosa gives no answer, she continues in the same soft tone. “You’ve washed a bit, but those buckets don’t really serve, do they. Would you like a real bath?”

Furiosa can feel her eyes going shiny with tears again. Yes, she would like a real bath. She would like to drink more clear water and eat the good food. She would like a moment of normal, to be fed and clean and not chained to anything, just for a few minutes to feel again like the girl in the green fields, with her own plan for the day and a good night’s sleep to come at the end. 

The woman with words on her face stands slowly, walks over carefully, reaches out and calmly unlocks the shackle around Furiosa’s ankle. She removes it with tenderness, laying a finger on the healing sores there and making a soft sound in her throat. “Come, child,” she says. “It’s better where we’re going.”

 

They walk together down stone corridors. Men pass them, boots echoing, tools jangling at their waists. Some have shaved heads and the white paint on their faces. Many seem not to notice them. Others do, but then avert their eyes. Furiosa can’t tell if it’s a sign of respect, embarrassment, or something else, or even whether it’s directed at her companion or at herself.

These tunnels and caves are not like the tunnels of the mine. They don’t stink of unwashed bodies or of excrement. The air smells of dry stone and faintly of grease and diesel. There is no dust to choke her or to make her eyes sting. 

She follows the woman up a flight of stairs. On this level, the guzzoline fumes have faded. Furiosa smells moss and minerals. They are walking into a soft humidity and the air is moving, just the slightest bit, across her skin. 

They are alone up here. They’ve left the bustle of activity below. The woman isn’t carrying a weapon. There is sunlight at the end of this corridor, coming down from above in a bright shaft, and there are steps leading up to meet it. Furiosa is doing her best to keep calm, to see and observe and learn, but her body tenses: Could this be a way out? Could she try again to run?  
She feels how her feet land on this stone floor. She is weighing how fast she could be, how fast this woman might be, wondering what’s up there and how she’d get down again.

Something in her movements must have given her away, because the woman abruptly stops and turns toward her. But there is no raised hand, no call for guards. There is just a gentle question: “Would you like to see?” 

The tattooed words are tiny but Furiosa is close enough to make out a few. She reads, “Magna Carta 1215,” “Archduke Ferdinand,” and “one small step.” She reads “battle for fuel” and “water wars.” She looks at the woman’s eyes and at the crinkles around them. She looks at her mouth and sees a smile there. 

“Yes,” Furiosa says. 

 

The steps lead up to a window. Then there are more steps going up again, and up, and finally they emerge into bright daylight and all around them is green.

Furiosa can’t breathe. 

She stops there at the top of the steps and for a moment her arms and legs won’t answer. Her lungs lose air. This isn’t home, no, it isn’t home, but it is green under blue sky and oh for her mother, for her friends who have gone on without her, for a little girl with a rifle and a wrench in her hand… It is green and it smells like _life_.

Her lungs start working again with a gasp and she stands there, chest heaving as she catches her breath. 

Now she can see how this garden is built, long planters stacked up high to create more growing space atop this tower. Now she can hear a soft, tinny trickle of water along pipes. Now she can smell the green as well as see it, taking it into her nose and her mouth and her lungs.

She looks to see what the woman with words on her face is doing. The woman has walked ahead and she’s reaching out to a row of plants. She sees Furiosa noticing, beckons her over. “It’s all right, child. Come and see.”

The plants are heavy with pea pods, flat and crisp. 

They eat them together. Furiosa is careful to to take only one for each one the woman picks. She is careful to chew, to swallow at the speed that the woman does. After a while the woman turns to look at her again, but although the muscles in Furiosa’s legs remember how to run, her face doesn’t remember how to smile. 

 

They make their way down several yards of flourishing vines. Furiosa is discovering things she hadn’t known she’d forgotten. That she must be gentle with the curving green stems, that they will bend only a little before breaking. That even when the sun is fierce, there is cooler air beneath the soft green leaves. That the pea pods that are easy to see are often outnumbered by the ones that are hidden.

Finally the woman straightens up and brushes her hands against her skirt. “You wanted a bath, didn’t you,” she says. “And the girls have been waiting to meet you.”


	6. Chapter 6

The bath room is a new luxury. It’s another small stone cell, but it is cheerful with sun coming through a generous window. The light sparkles on the surface of water in a deep, square tub that's cut into the stone. The air is moist and warmer than in the tunnel outside. The floor slopes just slightly down to small drainage holes at the base of the outside wall. There is a bar of soap--not new, this time, but the same pale lavender color--on a narrow stone ledge, in easy reach. The woman indicates a clean-looking bundle sitting on another, wider ledge. It looks like the one that had held clothes and the towel, back in the small stone cell. 

She explains the use of a stone channel at the edge of the room, demonstrates turning on a spigot so water runs through it and then disappears into an outlet drilled into the rock. Furiosa wonders that they don’t collect the waste for fertilizer. Or perhaps they do, and it’s a process that occurs out of sight.

“I’ll be outside,” the woman says. She asks, “Will you call when you’re done?” but she doesn’t wait out Furiosa’s silence this time. “I’ll check on you in a bit.”

Furiosa stands for a while, looking at the tub, at the water. The pipe that brings it has a greenish patina and it seems to be real copper underneath. She knows about copper. It's valuable. Slow to corrode as long as it’s kept above the soil, won’t clog the channel with rust the way galvanized iron will. Won’t crack and degrade in the sun like plastic. 

In her life before, she walked together with old women and other young girls in copper-piped fields. She remembers arms lifting her up, wrinkled hands guiding her fingers and helping her turn a bolt so the water would flow. She looks at the window and wishes she knew which direction to look for home, where out there to place her memories. 

 

By the time the woman returns, Furiosa’s skin is pink almost everywhere. She is scrubbing with her nails at the soles of her feet, at the black dirt that has settled deep in the grooves.

The woman brings a comb and a pair of scissors spotted with rust. She lets Furiosa stay in the warm water and combs her hair above the edge of the stone tub, tugging carefully at knots until she sighs and says, “I was afraid we’d have to cut it. Hold still, now.” 

Someone must have oiled the scissors and whetted the blades carefully to make them cut so well. Furiosa hears the sharp snick and feels pieces of her hair slither down her back. The woman cups the warm water in her hand and rinses the strands away. Furiosa’s mind is screaming danger at having sharp blades so close to her skin. But she lets it happen. This woman's hands are gentle, and she is tired. She is so tired.

 

The woman with the words on her face is called Miss Giddy. She gives her name casually, as she sits combing Furiosa’s newly shortened hair. Not her real name, she adds, but then she’d left her old life behind when she came here to this place. Might as well get a new name, too. Joe gave it to her, and he laughed when he did, but she figures it suits her. “He calls this the Citadel," she says. "‘Fortress commanding a city,’ it meant once. Did they have cities where you’re from, dear? Did they have taxis and trolleys? Theaters and cafes?”

Furiosa wants to ask who Joe is, and what those words mean, but self-preservation keeps her silent. She’s not sure if asking would be taken as politeness or as insubordination. Instead she sits silently while Miss Giddy dries her hair with the clean white towel. 

There is a fresh white tunic and wrap skirt for her, and a pair of sturdy sandals. She waits until they are handed to her before she puts them on. 

 

And then she is following Miss Giddy back through the stone corridors. She stays close, acts calm, does as she is told. Miss Giddy seems pleased and has treated her well. But Furiosa is taking note of each step and every turn. She is beginning to make a map in her head.

And then suddenly several young women come tumbling through a doorway, and Furiosa is caught in a tangle of arms wrapping round her shoulders and hands reaching out to touch her hair.

Her body tenses and her arms go up in self-defense. Her left hand connects with bone under thin skin and she hears a cry of pain. 

Furiosa freezes, heart pounding, everything around her a blurry haze. She braces for the blows that are sure to come now. It was too good to last. 

As her vision clears, she sees a young woman with one hand to her face. A taller girl, with brown curls and a round belly, reaches down, admonishing, “Let me see.” A third girl is watching them, eyes wide in a pale, thin face below white-blonde hair. They're all wearing white tunics and skirts like Furiosa's. They all have clean skin and neatly trimmed hair. 

They move with big gestures, careless, as if no one is watching them. 

After a moment the first girl lowers her hand. Her companion peers at her chin, looking for marks against brown skin. “Joe won’t like it if you have a bruise.”

“It’s all right. Joe sent Miss Giddy to pick her out, he wants her here. We just surprised her is all." She keeps her distance from Furiosa now, but her voice is soft. "I'm sorry we scared you." 

Another apology. Furiosa wonders if they mean anything, or if that's just how these people speak. 

"Where did you come from?" the girl asks.

And Furiosa, bewildered that she can no longer judge what is safe and what is danger, tells her something like the truth: "I don't know." 

She knows the salt mine is seven days away, roughly in the direction of the rising sun. She knows that the journey took her from dusty flatland through gullies and mesas to these high towers of stone. She knows how to judge directions and distances, a vital skill for a tribe whose home could never appear on a map. But she didn’t note the angles or the turns. She hadn’t wanted to know the way. 

And it wouldn’t have mattered, anyhow. In the first days she and her mother had watched the route together, as their captors' convoy made its way from the green lands to the mountains. But even the strongest child can be brought down by thirst and heat and pain and grief. Sometime after the third day, after sleepless nights and burning sun and the sight of searing flames, Furiosa had laid her head down on the hot metal of the truck bed. And she had closed her eyes.

The girl is still smiling at Furiosa, despite the cryptic answer, despite the swelling that is starting on her chin. 

“Miss Giddy said we should be nice to you,” she says. “I guess we were a little too excited to have a new friend.”


	7. Chapter 7

The girls live together, sharing large rooms with large windows high up in one of the towers. There are wooden tables. There are chairs with cloth cushions. There are rectangular blocks of paper that Furiosa recognizes as books, although she has never seen so many in one place. There are plants in small pots, stalks leaning toward the windows. There is a large, black-painted box on legs. Three of its sides make right angles and the fourth is a bowed-out flourish of a curve. She’s never seen anything like it before.

They share the living spaces and they share a room for sleeping, narrow metal-framed beds lined up along the walls. Miss Giddy assigns her a bed, which is how she learns that she is meant to live here, too. 

The sun is beginning to sink. Cool wind ruffles the fabric hung alongside the windows. The girl with the bruise on her chin sees Furiosa touching the fabric and explains: “They’re curtains. You close them to keep the light out.” Furiosa knows daylight as a thing of value, allowing time to dig and plant and harvest. Here, the girls show her, there are lamps that don’t require oil or wax or fire, that turn on with a button and make daylight an option, not a necessity. 

Those strange lamps keep the rooms lit well past sunset. Furiosa is yawning, her body expecting to sleep, but the girls settle into cushioned chairs in the main room and she sits there with them. With the curtains closed against the chill of the desert night, she learns their names and begins to learn their stories.

Electra was “raised up” six turns of the moon ago. She has five brothers and sisters down below. She speaks the words “raised up” with pride but her voice goes soft on the word “below,” and the other girls are silent with serious faces. Furiosa guesses she’s speaking of the tumbledown structures at the base of the towers. There seemed so little reason for people to settle there, she wonders what causes them to stay.

The taller girl is Well, eighteen years old and grew up over in Gastown, came on a trade run and got traded along with the diesel. Fair enough, she says, food here’s good and you’re out of the weather, aren’t you. Her hands are on her belly, cradling the baby forming there. 

Gastown, Furiosa thinks. What’s there? How far? Could she get there and if she could, would it be any closer to home?

The third girl is Neverland, light-haired and wide-eyed, who says quietly, “My father was with Joe on the day he became Immorta. I’m old enough now, and he would have been so proud.” Neverland is pale, slender, small breasts making the slightest peaks under her white top. She cuddles a threadbare cloth doll as she speaks, one hand stroking its yellow hair. 

Looking at Well, listening to Neverland, Furiosa is beginning to have an idea what is going on here. Her world was led by women, but she knows about men. There were boy children in the green place, and there were men to help make the children. There were men walking the fields, planting and harvesting. Men around the fires in the evenings, when everyone had a bowl of warm stew thick with vegetables, and the oldest Mothers would tell old stories. Men laughing and holding babies on their laps. Men who would die alongside women to protect what they had.

She knows men can be helpers, teachers, friends.

She also knows other things about men. She knows that men from the outside learn different things than the Many Mothers teach. She knows that not all men are generous with their strength. She has learned that the world was once so much greener, so much richer, and that sweet water and good soil haven’t always been precious and rare. She has been warned about what men can do.

 

When the girls get ready for sleep Furiosa watches and copies, trying to fit in. It’s not because she wants to stay: it’s to buy time to figure out how to leave. Maybe, if they like her enough, these people will help her to get away.

The girls show her how to clean her teeth with a square of cloth, rubbing each tooth and along her gums. The cloths go into a basket that, she learns, will be picked up in the morning. They clean their hands and faces with water from buckets that will be refilled each day. 

They change from their skirts and tunics into long, soft cotton shirts, and then they climb between clean white sheets on soft mattresses, each with her own pillow for her head. The sheets are real cotton too, smooth and without holes. Neverland tucks her doll in next to her, worn fabric head resting on the pillow beside her own.

And then, taking turns, the girls say goodnight to everything in the room.

“Goodnight lamps,” Neverland begins. “Goodnight books,” Well says after her. “Goodnight chairs,” Electra says. And on and on, several times round, until Neverland ends with a strange word, “piano.” And then the room goes silent and instead of lying awake to watch and think and plan, Furiosa is soon sound asleep.

 

“She used to say goodnight to every single one of her dolls,” Electra explains to Furiosa the next morning, although Furiosa hasn’t asked. Neverland has gone to bathe in the deep stone tub in the corner of their room. Well is reading, and Electra and Furiosa are still sitting at a table where food was laid out for breakfast. “It took ages to get through them all. So we convinced her that they’ll understand if she says goodnight to them all at once.”

“Joe doesn’t know,” says Well, looking up from her book. “He might think she’s a little simple.”

“So we don’t tell him,” Electra finishes the thought. “She’s as shine as we are, she’s just young. 

“She’s never had to face the real out there,” Well adds, angling her chin toward the window. “Hasn’t figured it out yet.” 

Electra shoots her a stern look. “And we’re letting her stay that way.”

Well shrugs, opens her book again. “Suits me. Better here anyway. If she’s lucky, she’ll never even know.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It seems that I am absurdly interested in the minutiae of life at the Citadel, and in looking over Furiosa's shoulder as she figures it all out.

After breakfast, Electra brings Furiosa to be measured, prodded, and bled by an old man with a cupboard full of metal instruments, in a large cavern with cots lined up in rows. Some of the cots are empty. Some are occupied by young men, not white-painted here but nearly as pale. The young men make sounds: One coughs every few seconds. One breathes in loud rasps. The old man sits on the edge of a cot and feeds something to the one who’s coughing, and the coughs subside. He lays a hand on the chest of the other, but shakes his head after a moment and moves on.

He doesn’t acknowledge them until Electra shouts down the row. “Professor! Come and meet our new girl!”

The Professor rises slowly from beside a boy whose body ends just below the waist, stumps wrapped in bandages where he should have had legs. 

Electra is already talking again before he’s halfway across the room. Miss Giddy sent them, she explains. Could he please sign off that the new girl’s all chrome? “Miss Giddy’s sure,” she says. Can he put her down as healthy, so they can get back and meet Joe?

This man, this Professor, speaks as slowly as he moves. Finally, he indicates an empty cot draped with a clean sheet. “Sit down,” he says.

Furiosa sits.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

She gave the girls her name last night, when they finished telling their own names and asked for hers. They were fascinated by the sound of it, the four rounded syllables. “But it’s such an angry name,” Neverland said, but then Electra startled them all by jumping up and running to the box on wheels, coming back to show them a word in a thin book full of black symbols on neatly drawn lines. Furiosa knows how to spell her name, and she knows its origin, but she’d never seen a book like this before. She looked up at Electra, confused.

Electra drew her over to the box on legs and flipped up a clever little shelf to expose a row of white and black levers. “Go on,” she said, and Furiosa pressed down on a white lever and got a lovely pure note in response. Then Electra coaxed Well over, and Well adjusted the seat to accommodate her belly and used both hands to press different levers. The music was fast and strange and new and didn’t sound like home at all, but the girls were smiling, shoulders touching, heads together as they gathered round and sang.

Furiosa repeats the song in her head as the Professor examines her skin, feels the muscles in her arms and legs, looks down her throat and into her ears and her nose. She recalls a tune from home, a lullaby for the end of the day, while he presses a horn-shaped tool to her chest and listens. She imagines he can hear the song, even though she knows he’s just listening to the workings of her body, to her heart and the air in her lungs.

The Professor taps on her elbows and knees and she’s surprised to see her arms and feet jump without her telling them to. 

He reaches for her hand, so slowly that she doesn’t feel anxious about being touched. It’s Electra who warns, “It’ll hurt but it’s only for a second,” before he pricks her finger with a needle and collects a red drop on a piece of glass.

He’s turned away from her, putting away his tools, when he finally speaks again. “When was your last monthly blood?” 

Furiosa answers at the same pace he speaks. She needs the time to put her words together, to decide if she will trust him. Electra doesn’t seem to be afraid, and so she decides she will not be afraid of him either, for now. He is still fussing at the cabinet, his back to them, when she says “I haven’t had one yet.” 

But Electra’s face goes suddenly serious, eyes wide. Her hand shoots out as if to stop any more words. So Furiosa doesn’t tell him anything more. She doesn’t say that she’d been grateful not to bleed when she had only dirty rags and scant rations of water. She doesn’t tell him that she thinks she is far too old, now, to still be a girl who’s never bled that way. She doesn’t tell him that it worries her. 

When the Professor finally turns around, though, he doesn’t look concerned at all. “Not surprising when you’re so thin,” he says, nodding as he looks her up and down. “You fatten up a bit, come back to me in a month or two, you’ll be--” he looks to Electra--”What do you kids call it? You’ll be shiny and chrome.”

He walks away without waiting for a response, back to the rows of cots where there is a man with his head wrapped in bandages, a boy pale and shiny with sweat, another boy curled up around himself, tiny and alone. Furiosa would watch to see what he does next, but Electra is already up and heading for the door.

 

“He’s embarrassed,” Electra says. They’re up on top of the middle tower, sampling spinach and eating more crisp peas. They’re not having a conversation, exactly: Electra has thirty or forty words for every one of Furiosa’s. But Electra doesn’t seem bothered by the silences, and Furiosa is finding that the words come more easily in the spaces between Electra’s chatter.

Around them, men are harvesting peas into baskets, picking red peppers, transferring tiny starts from trays into the long planters that are being slowly raised and lowered as the chains connecting them turn.

"He'll never actually check,” Electra says. “He goes bright red if he has to look under our skirts. We’ll go back when you’ve gained your weight, and we’ll tell him everything’s normal. Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine. Here,” she adds, “try this.” She reaches overhead and plucks a shiny red pepper, hands it to Furiosa. “You wouldn’t think it would be so sweet.”

Furiosa bites into the pepper and it is sweet, it is so sweet, it tastes of pure sun and water. She eats the whole thing, seeds crunching between her teeth, and then she says, “Thank you.”

Electra laughs. “You can have all you want. I come up here a lot, no one’s going to bother us. Joe would toss them over the edge if they did.” She looks up at the sun and down at the shadows. “C’mon, we’d better get back. Can’t be missing when he comes to visit.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this chapter, this is where we meet Joe. Nothing graphic, it's all off-screen, but--well, you know what his intentions are.

They arrive back at the rooms to a scolding from Miss Giddy. The other girls are getting ready, and they insist on helping Furiosa get ready, too. They comb her hair for her, they adjust her clothes. They fuss over how thin she is.

"Hail for the Immorta!" It's a man's voice that echoes down the hall. 

The girls scramble to form a line. Furiosa is with them, arms over her head and fingers linked in salute, the way her new friends have taught her. She feels foolish but she remembers and she stills her mind, she keeps calm in this strange ritual, and she waits to see what will happen. She is waiting to see if she should fight, if she has any chance to win.

Joe comes in wearing guns. 

There are two men with him. Their hair is short but not shaved and their faces are not painted. They are wearing sand-colored trousers and heavy, sand-colored shirts that are frayed at collar and cuffs. One has a bandolier crossing his chest. There is a hole over the pocket on the opposite side. The hole is also frayed but it’s round and not much larger than a bullet. 

The two men take up places beside the door. Joe unbuckles his gunbelt, heavy with two holstered pistols, and gives it to the man with the bandolier, who fastens it around his own waist over the two guns he already has.

Joe is not a young man. His hair, longer than his companions’, is turning white at the sides. But he is trim and his face is unscarred. There is a feeling to him, in that moment, that reminds Furiosa of the Many Mothers: he doesn’t ask for the other man’s help, and he doesn't give an order. He lets go of the gunbelt with confidence that a hand will be out to take it. 

Joe’s shirt is decorated with bits of brightly-colored fabric. Some are arranged in bars made up of different colors. Some have circular pieces of metal hanging from them. 

There is a name written on Joe’s shirt, squared-off letters sewn in with black thread. Moore. But they call him Joe, or Immortan. Maybe that’s not his shirt. Maybe he got it in trade. Maybe it was salvaged from Moore’s body.

Neverland smiles up at him as he asks what she did all day, and receives a pat on the head before he moves on. He puts a hand on Well’s belly without asking first, jiggles her flesh and speaks to the baby, “C’mon little man, let’s feel you move in there!” His voice is loud already, and then he raises it to speak to the men by the door, “There he goes. Regular little soldier in there, we’ll take him right out and teach him to ride!” He gives her belly one last pat and then spares a nod for Well herself, “Good girl,” as his eyes move on to Furiosa.

When he greets her it's with a sudden flourish. “The new one!” he says, clapping his hands together. Joe is not especially tall but he seems to take up a lot of space, seems to tower over her even though she’s just a few inches shorter. “Miss Giddy taking good care of you?” he asks, loud and with a smile so wide it makes Furiosa uneasy. He doesn’t wait for an answer, just continues on. “You getting along with these girls? Enough to eat?” He reaches out and pinches her upper arm, then lays a finger on her collarbone where it sticks out above her tunic. “Professor says we need to fatten you up. Miss Giddy, you make sure she eats, I don’t want to see this--” he taps her collarbone, ”next time I come in.”

Furiosa glimpses Miss Giddy making that strange salute with her hands, bowing her head at Joe’s order.

And then Joe is bowing at Electra, but he’s got that wide grin on his face again. He grasps her upper arm-- “Plenty of meat on this one, boys!” and then he leads her away.

Joe’s two soldiers are still keeping guard at the main entrance. As Joe and Electra disappear through a doorway, one of them calls over, “Make us a good one, Joe!” 

And then Well strides swiftly over to the piano, sits down, and begins to play a tune. Furiosa hadn’t realized the piano could sound so loud.

 

The days go on. Furiosa gets used to having light in their rooms long after the sun has set. She doesn’t get used to the sleeping hours, often yawning in the evening while the other girls chat or read or sing, and then waking at first light while the other girls sleep on. Feeling tired becomes a way of life for her again.

She and Electra often walk in the gardens. Furiosa won’t go on her own. Sometimes, at night, the smell of vines and flowers wafts down from atop the towers and she lies in her bed with heart aching and eyes squeezed shut, and she tries to remember what happened on those days she rode chained to the truck bed, dizzy from the sun and lack of water, her mother’s body left further and further behind. Which way did they turn after the mountains, what shapes were the shadows, what form was the land, she can’t recall and trying makes her chest feel tight, like the very scent of home is what’s stopping her from getting enough air.

So Furiosa doesn’t walk alone in the gardens, but when Electra is there she fills the empty, sad spaces with her chatter, and it’s easier to breathe. And with the pain pushed back a little, Furiosa can look out over the desert, look from all the angles as they walk atop each tower. 

She never sees anything to guide her.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Trigger warning for talking about sad things having to do with babies... and for me having way too many feels about all of this.)

Sometimes Furiosa wanders down to the garages and watches the men work on cars and trucks and bikes. Sometimes vehicles come in smashed, with doors missing and wheels askew. They leave again with the dents pounded out, chrome polished, engines growling loud but smooth. The men are loud too. They toss around insults. They steal parts from one another and then gleefully show off the results, no shame at all. It’s nothing like the quiet, deliberate work in the irrigated fields. 

And yet, things are getting done. Things are being built. Somehow, as she sits in a corner of the garage, men shouting and the clank of metal and the whoosh of blowtorches all around her, there is something familiar, something comforting. 

Sometimes she sits with Well at the window in their living space, and together they look out at a greyish smudge on the horizon. “That’s Gastown,” Well explains to her the first time they share the window, coming up behind Furiosa and leaning in beside her, resting her elbows on the wide stone sill. “Bunch of low-octane bastards,” she says. “Maybe they’ll send me home someday, but I hope it’s a long time from now.”

Well never hesitates to ask for extra food, to use up all the towels, to spend an afternoon in the bath, hair piled up on her head and a book in her hand. When Joe comes to visit, she salutes with the others but she’s a little less quick to do so, and her hands come down from over her head just a little sooner. “It’s a trade-off,” she tells Furiosa with a shrug. “A woman’s got her freedom in Gastown, but your work buys you rations and a bunk. You want fresh produce, you want extra water, you want a bed that isn’t crawling with critters? The boys’ll barter, but you gotta have something to trade. Here maybe we don’t get to decide for ourselves when or how, but we get a lot more for it, don’t we.” 

When Furiosa doesn’t reply, her tone softens. “It wasn’t like that where you came from, was it?” She puts a hand on Furiosa’s shoulder, suddenly gentle. “You’ll learn Joe’s ways,” she says. “It’s not that bad.”

 

Furiosa knows how women’s bodies work. She notices before Miss Giddy does that Well is looking uncomfortable. That her ankles are more swollen. That the shape of her belly has changed. The baby has begun to settle with its head between Well’s hips, getting ready to be born.

Well has been increasingly quiet. She’s never had Electra’s chatter, but now she seems far away even when the girls all sit together in the evenings. She still plays the piano, but now it’s lullaby after lullaby each evening when the sun goes away and the lamps are on. She only knows a few, and so it’s the same music repeating, sometimes for hours.

Tonight Miss Giddy is mending a frayed tunic, sitting upright in a high-backed chair that rocks on bent-wood runners. Well is at the piano again, and the girls lean against each other as they listen. Neverland sits on a cushion on the floor, her body resting against Electra’s legs, one arm thrown over the other girl’s thigh. Electra’s head is on Furiosa’s shoulder and Furiosa realizes, surprised, that she has been tangling her fingers in Electra’s hair.

“She’s driving me nuts,” Electra says as Well starts the same tune for the fourth time that night. But she says it quietly, a whisper in Furiosa’s ear. “If I do this when I’ve got a baby in me, promise me you’ll make me stop.”

Furiosa nods against the other girl’s soft curls. She knows she won’t, though. Sometimes women are afraid, she thinks. She remembers how some women would greet their first babies with easy joy, shrugging off the anticipation of hours or days of pain and blood. But the Many Mothers trained their girls to bring life as well as take it, and Furiosa has held an older Sister’s hand while another woman tried desperately to turn a baby that had slipped into breech. She has seen how much blood can come out after a birth. She has seen a new mother’s skin turn pale and then cold. 

 

Some nights, Neverland goes and sits by Well, crowding onto the piano bench, hip against her hip and shoulder against her shoulder. Well lets her, shifts her arm a bit, and keeps playing. During the daytime Neverland brings her gifts. A ripe tomato. A pair of worn-out trousers, cut down into squares for diapers. A little cloth doll from her collection with rare, bright red cloth hair.

Electra brings a gift, too: Five keys, polished bright and strung together on a circle of wire rope. She shakes them and they rattle together, metal clinking cheerfully. 

Neverland looks confused. “Is Joe giving the baby a car?”

“They like the noise,” Electra explains. “My family has something like this, bits of metal on a string. We shared it, for the babies.”

Well nods, one hand making gentle circles on her belly. “For as long as they lived,” she says softly.

“For as long as they lived,” Electra agrees, and there is silence for a moment. “When her teeth start coming in, the keys will be nice and cool for her mouth.” 

Well smiles a small smile and takes the gift, her other hand still rubbing on her belly. “Do you think it’s a girl?” she says.

“I think it’s a baby,” Electra tells her, putting her hand on Well’s. “I think it will be beautiful.”

“Your baby will live for years and years,” Neverland says, sounding like she believes it. “He’s from the Immorta, he’ll have the best of everything.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this chapter a while ago, and I've been very nervous about posting it. I guess, I started sharing this story, and this is the next part, so um... here it is. But I'm throwing "read with caution" signs all over it.
> 
> I'm not even sure what trigger warnings to give without giving away what happens, but maybe this will serve: I have a dear friend who is pregnant and I will not let her read this chapter until she has her baby and the baby is healthy and all is well. If god forbid something goes wrong I will probably never let her read it. 
> 
> I won't be insulted if anyone decides to give up on the story here. Thank you for the chance to share this with you for as long as you choose to read!

Labor isn’t any better or worse than Furiosa expected. It starts slow, with Well grimacing in pain throughout the day as contractions start small and irregular then settle into a rhythm: contraction, deep breath, rest, again. 

Well wanders to and from the piano, playing fragments of her lullabies until a gush of fluid soaks the piano bench and then she’s too distracted to play.

The girls are up with her all night, worried Neverland clutching her hand, Electra pacing, Miss Giddy calmly brewing herbs for Well to sip. Now and then Miss Giddy places a hand on Well’s belly, feeling the strength of a contraction, feeling the baby’s shape. Furiosa hangs back and watches how they do this here.

By the time morning is making the electric lights seem pale, Well is sweating and crying as she lies in her narrow bed, knees bent as Miss Giddy peers between her thighs. Every few minutes she wails as her belly tightens to push the baby down. The other women don’t seem to know to tell her to walk, to squat, to try sitting in their warm-water bath.

Finally Furiosa can’t stand it anymore. She waits until a contraction ends and then she puts an arm behind Well’s shoulders and draws her up to sitting, waits out another cry of pain. “She needs to stay in bed,” Miss Giddy tries to tell her. 

But Furiosa is remembering what it was to defend a thing she cared about. She is remembering blood splashing off a machete when a wanderer found his way into the fields, when she found him with an arm around her younger Sister’s neck and his trousers already loosened. She is remembering being eleven years old and putting a bullet in a man’s skull, so that the Green Place would never appear on a map. “She needs to be up,” she says, and it comes out a snarl, and Miss Giddy lets her.

They pace the room together, Well leaning on Furiosa while the others watch. Sweat drips from Well’s hair onto Furiosa’s neck and soaks through her tunic. Furiosa rubs Well’s back while she sits in the stone tub, warm water running past them and on out through a channel in the wall, so the pool stays clean and clear. Then they walk again, and Well squats through the contractions until they’re so close together that she’s catching a single breath between her cries. 

And then Well says, “I need to--” and Furiosa says, “Yes,” and the girls are all watching as a tiny body slides from between Well’s legs and into Furiosa’s hands.

The baby cries immediately, energetic and loud. Well’s hair is stuck to her forehead, her skin is damp and pale, there is blood smeared on her thighs and on the floor around her. But she smiles, and she reaches for her child. 

Furiosa looks at the tiny person she is holding.

The baby is a girl. She kicks her feet. She has ten toes and perfect dimpled knees. She has tiny, precious fingers that she waves in the air. Her cries come from a pink, bow-shaped mouth. There is no face above it. 

There is glistening red flesh folded deep into her skull where skin and bone and cartilage should have made a nose. The top of her head should be rounded to fit sweetly into a mother’s palm. Instead, her skull caves in as if a fist had landed there. There is a shine of grey, blood-streaked brain surrounded by gaping skin and unfinished bone. 

Furiosa cradles the baby to her chest and turns away.

There is silence.

And then there is Well, wailing louder than she had during labor, and this time there is no pause between her cries. 

 

The baby is already dead before Joe comes to see it. Miss Giddy took it from Furiosa and wrapped it in a towel, and then she went to another room and when she came back the little arms and legs were no longer moving. Now she’s fussing about, wiping blood from the floor and gathering soiled towels with quiet efficiency. No one has asked her what happened. 

Well is tucked into bed and the girls are arrayed around her. They haven’t even helped her clean up yet. She’d cried harder when they tried, and so they just led her to clean sheets and covered the blood with blankets that would also keep her warm. Electra holds her hand. Neverland sits on the floor beside her, head resting on Well’s thigh. Furiosa is perched on a chair nearby, elbows on knees, chin on hands. 

Joe arrives with the Professor on his heels. He goes directly to Well and wraps her in a hug, murmuring “My poor girl,” and “What can I do to help?” Well accepts the hug but shakes her head at the offer. 

And he promptly drops his arms from around her and leaves her side. Furiosa steals away from the other girls and follows, careful to stay far enough away that she might just be choosing a book to read.

The Professor has spread the towel on one of their tables. The tiny body is splayed out on it as he examines the limbs, presses on the belly, taps on the chest, then leans in close to peer at the head. 

"Another one," the Professor says softly when Joe joins him. “This one shows signs of--”

Joe gives the baby a brief look before he interrupts. "Waste of resources," he says. "How long until she's ready to try again?"

Furiosa recognizes how the Professor takes a while to speak, but Joe isn't waiting. "How long?" he says again, and his voice is edged with anger.

The Professor's eyes flicker over to Well, whose gaze is fixed on the tiny form in front of him. Her face is pale under the shine of sweat and tears. Her hair is lank, clinging to her cheeks and neck and shoulders. He wraps the baby back up and lifts the bundle into his arms. He holds it gently, making sure the head is supported, as if it were something precious after all.

"Ninety days," the Professor says. "Wouldn't try before ninety days."

“Fine,” Joe says. “Give her whatever she needs to be ready.” 

To Miss Giddy he says, more loudly, “Look after our girl.” And to the rest of them, “I’m not giving up on you. We’ll try again soon.” And then he’s out the door, the Professor following with the tiny bundle still in his arms.


End file.
